Joe Banner ran two coaching searches as president of the Philadelphia Eagles, and two more as CEO of the Cleveland Browns.

And while most people can’t fathom how the Detroit Lions failed to uncover Matt Patricia’s 1996 arrest during their monthlong coaching search, Banner had an entirely different response when he stumbled across the news Thursday morning on Twitter.

“My reaction when I saw it was, ‘Oh my God, this could have happened to me,’ ” Banner said. “This could have happened to almost anybody.”

He and a friend were charged with one count of aggravated sexual assault during a spring break trip to South Padre Island, Texas. The two were indicted by a grand jury in August 1996, and the case was dismissed in January 1997 when the accuser declined to testify.

While the facts of the case remain unclear — Patricia wouldn’t provide details of the night in question on Thursday, and attempts by the Free Press to reach the woman involved have been unsuccessful — the Lions have found themselves in a minefield made more dangerous by a vetting process apparently hamstrung by state law.

“In our instances, we’re kind of depending on the depth to which the security guy went to feel comfortable that there was nothing that we needed to know,” Banner said. “And if either it was really hidden or he wasn’t super thorough, I could see how this could happen.”

The Lions use an employment background screening company that conducts background checks on all hires, and that firm produced a report on Patricia during the hiring process that did not include any reference to his Texas arrest.

It’s unclear what, if any, information the firm uncovered about the case while vetting Patricia, but when the Lions went back to examine why they only recently learned about the incident, they discovered that Massachusetts employment law prevents the screening company from providing, or them from using as part of their employment decision, information about an arrest, indictment or conviction more than seven years old.

Because Patricia was a resident of Massachusetts at the time of his hiring, the Lions say they were subject to those laws as well as other state of Michigan and federal regulations.

“(We) always (do) the right thing in our employment practices, including background checks, interview questions, employment practices at all levels, whether it’s a player, coach or executive,” Lions president Rod Wood said Friday. “I understand why people might be frustrated that we didn’t know this and maybe didn’t do the wrong thing to learn about it. But I’d rather be on the side of always doing the right thing and if there’s an arrow to be taken for doing the right thing, I’ll take it 100 times over doing the wrong thing and getting criticized for doing the wrong thing.”

Wood said the Lions have received information from background checks that led them to rescind other job offers as recently as the last few weeks.

"So it’s not as if we receive something that we don’t like, we ignore it," Wood said. “We act on it.”

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'No surprises'

NFL teams can use the league’s security arm to perform background checks on coaching and other hires, though a sampling of former team executives shows that’s rarely the case.

Banner said his teams would rely on in-house security personnel to vet a small group of candidates once their coaching searches were under way. Former Houston Texans general manager Charlie Casserly said he used team security to run background checks, too, though NFL security handled the vetting process when he consulted on the New York Jets coaching hire in 2015.

The Lions, meanwhile, have employed a mix of local law enforcement officials, in-house personnel and outside firms to run background checks on everyone from head coaches to general managers to draft prospects and even summer interns going back the last three decades.

Greg Suhajda, a former special agent for both the Secret Service and FBI who has consulted with professional teams and colleges on past high-level hires, said situations like what the Lions encountered with Patricia are exactly what most are trying to avoid.

“They wanted just additional stuff just to make sure something like this wouldn’t come out,” said Suhajda, now the senior managing director of the business intelligence division at Mackinac Partners. “It goes to reputation of the organization, certainly. … This is kind of the exact thing that a lot of these teams fear.”

Suhajda said the background checks that he has run for professional teams have been all-encompassing searches that sometimes take weeks to complete.

Typically, job candidates authorize teams “to delve into any financial issues, any criminal issues, any social issues or litigation matters, so you’re not worried about what legalities there are,” Suhajda said.

His firm uses legal research sites like LexisNexis, where Patricia’s arrest is easy to find, and TLO, plus more personal legwork that can include visiting a prospective hire’s former places of residence and even providing a team’s anonymous tip hotline to friends or colleagues who may be reluctant to spill potentially damaging information about someone they know.

“Certainly, fiscally, you’re worried about a lot of financial aspects that may go to the person’s character, or honesty or integrity as to what he said on some of the applications,” Suhajda said. “And determining the veracity of all that is critical from an integrity standpoint. And surely one of the questions (for Patricia) had to be, have you ever been convicted of a crime or charged with a crime?

"And in this case, he certainly wasn’t convicted, he was charged, so it would go to his character that he failed to even bring this up, in my opinion. Cause certainly if you’re indicted there had to have been something there, something was filed, and it was serious enough where somebody thought, or a group of people thought, the evidence was significant enough to go forward.”

Patricia, in his news conference Thursday, stressed that “there was never any situation in the Lions interview where I did not disclose the truth.” But neither he nor the Lions would reveal what questions were asked in his two January interviews.

Banner said most head coaching interviews that he was a part of often included a broadly worded question like, “Is there anything else that we should know from your background if we consider you?”

While it’s understandable why Patricia would not disclose his arrest, Suhajda said “it would have behooved him, I think, to admit it with explanation.”

“Most stuff, if you have an explanation for it, fine,” Suhajda said. “But we don’t want surprises. No surprises is kind of the mantra when you’re digging deep into someone from a reputational standpoint or whatever might impact not just the person but the organization and its employees. So this certainly counts as a surprise.”

Facts, not headlines, matter

Whether early revelations about Patricia’s arrest would have disqualified him as a candidate with the Lions is another story.

Patricia never was convicted of a crime. The Lions focused their attention on him as a replacement for Jim Caldwell from the start of their search, if not before. Wood said earlier this year that general manager Bob Quinn had been touting Patricia’s merits as coach for two years; Quinn and Patricia spent 12 seasons working together with the New England Patriots.

And the Lions, in a statement released jointly by Wood, Quinn and owner Martha Firestone Ford when news of Patricia’s arrest first surfaced Wednesday night, seemed to provide mitigating factors for whatever did happen back in 1996.

“Matt was 21 at the time and on spring break in Texas,” the statement said.

Banner said there’s a “big difference” between the charges coming to light now, three months after Patricia was hired, and during the search process.

“We don’t know if it would have changed the outcome, but certainly they would have had a very serious, extensive conversation of, ‘Do we care? Should this (impact) our decision? If we are going to go forward anyway, do we put this out publicly now or run the risk that somebody finds out later?’ ” Banner said. “Totally different if they had known then versus now. It may or may not have changed the hire, but certainly totally different in terms of the thought process, the discussion, the debate. Frankly, even the PR strategy.”

The Lions, though they left enough wiggle room in their statement to change course should more facts come to light, gave Patricia a strong show of support Thursday when Quinn, Wood and the 92-year-old Ford attended Patricia’s 7-minute news conference.

"Based upon everything we have learned, we believe and have accepted Coach Patricia’s explanation and we will continue to support him,” the statement read. “We will continue to work with our players and the NFL to further awareness of and protections for those individuals who are the victims of sexual assault or violence.”

The Lions, of course, were not the only ones who did not know about Patricia’s past.

The Patriots, where Patricia worked for 14 seasons, said in a statement Thursday that they did not know about the charge until this week. One of Patricia’s old coaches and colleagues from his college days at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute — when the incident occurred — said no one in that program was aware of the arrest, either. And Banner said he doesn’t believe the Browns, who interviewed Patricia and hoped to hire him for their head-coaching job in January 2016, ever came across the information in their background checks of Patricia.

“I spoke to them after the fact and they were nothing but glowing about him and how serious and real their interest was,” said Banner, whose time with the Browns predated their interview with Patricia. “I spoke to people involved in the interviewing process there and they had nothing but very positive things to say about him. I think if they knew this, that wouldn’t have been the case.”

Of course, in the #MeToo era, the scrutiny on these type of allegations is heightened, and no matter when news of his arrest came out, that's something Patricia and the Lions couldn't avoid.

“Nothing should eliminate a candidate because of a headline,” said Casserly, now an analyst with NFL Network. “The research should eliminate a candidate. I think we jump on headlines too much. Go back to the Duke lacrosse (case), OK? At the end of the day, the Duke lacrosse, as I understood it, proved that those players were not guilty of what they were charged for. And the coach was not guilty of anything. So we’ve got to be careful we don’t fall into Duke lacrosse anytime there’s a headline. But anything that comes up needs to be vetted, needs to be taken seriously. I mean, that’s the commonsense approach to the thing.”